The instrument panel could be one more customizable part of your next car, or so believes QNX, which has a vision of reconfigurable digital instrument cluster. In the aircraft industry it’s called a glass cockpit: The main instrument panel is a reconfigurable CRT (old tech) or LCD display (new tech). At this week’s Convergence technology show in Detroit, QNX showed off a prototype panel. It uses the QNX Neutrino RTOS (real time operating system) and QNX Aviage HMI (human machine interface) Suite running on the Freescale MPC5121e processor along with Adobe Flash and OpenGL ES. Try this explanation in English: QNX believes proven technology from the automotive market (software that doesn’t crash, proven microprocessors) and known technology from the PC industry (Adobe Flash) can be used to quickly create reconfigurable digital instrument clusters. Why do you need to see the speedometer or tachometer when you’re backing? The QNX cluster could replace that with a view from the backup camera.
QNX sees the instrument panel including the speedometers, tachometers, gauges and idiot lights (water and oil temperature and pressure), your hybrid’s energy meter, the backup camera, MP3 player info, and navigation information. It might also mean that a tall driver could downsize the instruments 20% so nothing gets cut off by the top of the steering wheel. At night, you might see only the most crucial information (Saab does this now with a traditional instrument panel). Properly designed, it might provide some of the benefits of a head-up display without the $1,000 cost.

At present, it’s just a prototype. No automakers have publicly signed on – yet. Some have done glass cockpit instrument panels already: The Mercedes-Benz S-Class already has a custom glass cockpit screen that switches to a night vision camera and the bottom of the 2009 BMW 7 Series instrument panel is a configurable LCD.
QNX posted this two minute video of a prototype display running on a PC emulator: